Yes Yes Yes: Icarus Proudbottom’s Weekly Typing Series

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No hyperbole: Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing is probably one of the best educational typing games ever, largely because it doesn’t even try for two seconds to be educational. It’s about a guy named Icarus who kinda tries to teach you typing skills occasionally, and also his Native American spirit owl pal Jerry who is over 2000 years old and speaks like a Renaissance Faire reject. The best news of all the news? It’s now become a (still free) weekly episodic series. The plot? An entirely surreal and silly murrrrrrder mystery heavily inspired by Twin Peaks.

This season will contain five episodes total, and the first is a solidly goofy 20-or-so-minute experience. It doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of insanity that the first Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing so gleefully scaled, and the writing isn’t quite as strong as I was hoping. Also, the typing bits sometimes drag a bit, though they’re rather few for, um, a typing game.

But this is only the first episode, and there are some absolutely magnificent moments (oh god, choosing your backstory). And the CLIFFHANGER ENDING seems to suggest that things are only going to spiral out of control from here. Since there is almost no way you’re even the slightest bit invested in these characters, I can give you a SPOILER to pique your interest. If you want to avoid it, avert your gaze now: Icarus Proudbottom is the murder victim. DUN DUN DUN.

You’ll be able to find the whole series here, and it’s totally free. I definitely recommend “tuning in,” given that it’s almost certain to go so egregiously off the rails that you won’t be able to look away. Prepare to type. Prepare to type like your life depends on it.

I really wish I had got on better with Icarus Proudbottom, but there’s a mechanic introduced pretty early where you have to type each letter several times before you can move on and that just broke the game for me.

I liked this, it’s well presented and enjoyable. But I found the humor rather forced compared with the likes of Frog Fractions – the kind of “look at us we’re being surreal” sort of surrealism – more Harvard Lampoon than Monty Python.